Plan B

Day 4 of foot surgery recovery: This afternoon I moved into the den and set up headquarters with my laptop and wireless keyboard and mouse... just in time for a flurry of afternoon visitors.

Claire and Deb showed up after a movie matinee outing, and added Pen and Palette and Oreo artwork to my cast, and a delightful distraction from foot pain with their visit.

While they were here, Pamela and Hannah came and brought baby Peter...

But I'm writing backwards... so now I'll flashback to yesterday and this morning....

Yesterday our realtor called to say that the owners of the house we put a contingency contract on have another offer. It’s the really really yummy house in a great location and everything… but we haven’t sold our house and we really really don’t want to be the proud owners of two houses, so… we had to let it go.

Of course I’d been walking around in that house in my mind for three months… picking out new furniture, imagining myself writing a best-seller in the Virginia Wolf Room (a room of my own) and enjoying the front porch swing and…. Sigh.

So as friends got the news, the condolences started coming in. (And no, not one person has said "I told you so"... because we didnt' bury a statue of St. Joseph in the yard:-) Sometimes I don’t want to be encouraged, you know? I just want to be sad. To grieve the loss on my own terms. Especially while I’m lying in bed with my foot in a cast and throbbing with pain (when the Percocet wears off) and everything…

But somehow grace arrived with the news. A friend was here when I got the phone call, and that helped a lot. And it was my Goddaughter, Katherine’s 10th wedding anniversary and she came over to see me this morning. I was Maid of Honor in her wedding… and we blinked and now she has three children and it’s ten years later. Her house has been on the market longer than ours, as her family is wanting to make a change, too. She brought me a latte and wrote on my cast. Here: “Be still and take care of you!”

I had been reading Anne Lamott’s book of essays, Plan B: Further Thougths on Faith. At one point she says, “You don’t always get what you want. You get what you get….life, and grace.”

So I’m trying to be open to Plan B. And to grace. A good friend emailed me saying that God has something more wonderful for me, and it might be something within. She knows I’m stirred up about my writing. So the For Sale sign comes out of the yard for a few months and the focus goes within.

Today is Mary Allison’s birthday. She would be 30. She’s my Goddaughter who was killed in 1998. The one who moved in with us ten years ago this week, actually. I wrote about her memorial service about in September. Just remembering her today and the gift she was to our family, and the lessons we learned when we lost her.

Working on an essay a little bit today but feeling sleepy from the meds, so I think Plan B will be to try to do what Katherine wrote on my cast: be still.

And read some more in The Girl from Charnelle… my Christmas present from Stacy (well, I used the Barnes & Noble card she gave me to order it)…. I’ll relax and enjoy K. L. Cook’s writing for a while tomorrow….

Takes place in a south Texas town in the early 60s…. stay tuned for a review in a future blog….